The LIO’s growing democracy gap: an endogenous source of polity contestation

The Liberal International Order (LIO) is under pressure from various angles. To account for this phenomenon, a recent trend is to focus on endogenous sources of contestation—institutional properties of the order that create negative feedback effects. In this article, we seize on and extend an endogenous explanation centring on the LIO’s political structure and institutional design. While existing research stipulates a connection between the rising authority of liberal international organisations (IOs) and their increasing politicisation, we still lack a clear understanding of the reasons behind the growing rejection of the order at the level of mass publics. We argue that the LIO’s institutional setup contains a widening ‘democracy gap’ denoting a disconnect between the participatory legitimation requirements for the exercise of political authority and the technocratic legitimation rationale characterising IOs. By creating a justification deficit, the democracy gap incites growing political dissatisfaction and, by implying a responsiveness deficit, it turns policy contestation into outright polity contestation. We probe the plausibility of our theoretical argument in case studies of the EU and the international regimes on trade and human rights, and subsequently discuss the analytical and normative implications of our argument.